


Cherry Stone

by scioscribe



Category: The Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt
Genre: 4 + 1 Things Fic, Future Fic, Gen, Missing Scene, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28274865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Four people Maybeth Tillerman learned from (and one she taught).
Comments: 15
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Cherry Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raspberryhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/gifts).



> With many thanks to Edonohana for music suggestions and cheerleading.

**1**

Momma taught Maybeth music. Maybeth couldn’t remember learning about singing—what it was, how to do it, the way she could toss her voice up in the air like a ball or unfurl it like a ribbon.

Music was everybody’s first language, James told her. That was why women sang to their babies. It was why nursery rhymes were like little songs, all tinkly and up-and-down. A lot of people lost their fluency in it as they went along, but people like Maybeth kept it. The great composers were like Shakespeare, writing masterpieces in the language they knew best. It was all art, all part of what was passed on to a person that he could build on.

Maybeth wanted to take in as much as she could. She didn’t know what she would do to pass it on, but she’d have time to decide that later.

She thought she understood what James meant. If music was a language, then what Maybeth sang and played was a kind of talking. It was a way to talk to people she would never even meet: Bach, Chopin, Brahms; Joan Baez, June Carter, Emmylou Harris.

She knew this was right, because on her records, she could hear it happening—it was like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation and getting invited into it; it was friendly. There was “Wayfaring Stranger” on _David’s Album_ and then again, eleven years later, on _Roses in the Snow_. And then there was Maybeth, doing the dishes, singing: _I’m going there to see my mother, she said she’d meet me when I come._

Momma. It was always her way to talk to Momma. She remembered their kitchen sink in Provincetown stopped up with steamy water and squirts of green-smelling Palmolive and the way Momma would flick soapsuds at her as Maybeth dried. (Handling all the dishes so carefully, even the jelly-jar glasses and even when they were so hot, because she didn’t want to drop and break something they wouldn’t have the money to replace. Their dishtowels had always been worn down to the nap, and getting the dishes dry had meant wiping them over and over. Dicey and James didn’t like it and would put them away still damp, but Maybeth wanted them nice.)

Momma hadn’t played the song for her because they hadn’t had a record player, not back then; they hadn’t even had a radio. She had sung it to her on one of those nights, though—she’d sung it as carefully as Maybeth did the dishes, several times over, until it was safely in Maybeth’s memory.

_I know dark clouds were heading around me; I know my way is rough and steep. But beauteous fields lie just before me…_

“Where are the beauteous fields supposed to be, Momma?” Maybeth had said.

“Over the River Jordan,” Momma had said quietly. “Up in heaven.”

Over and up. That was what she’d held onto when Momma had died: Momma, the Poor Wayfaring Stranger. Momma, over and up.

She still knew all Momma’s songs and the way she’d sung them, and she still dried the dishes like Momma had taught her. That was talking too, even if saying it would just make James laugh.

Love was its own kind of learning, a way of finding the marks someone else had left on you and studying them.

**2**

None of them had had friends in Provincetown, not even Momma. At most there’d been people who didn’t mind them, people who were so all-around nice that they couldn’t help being friendly even to the Tillermans. That was enough to get by on, when there was family too. That was what they’d all said, anyway—what they’d had to say, because it didn’t do any good to say anything else.

Maybeth remembered what a hard, straight line Dicey’s mouth had made the time a girl in Maybeth’s class had had a big birthday party with a pink-frosted cake and a cookout on the beach, and Maybeth had been the only girl not invited.

“So what,” Dicey had demanded. “We can eat on the beach anytime we want, and you don’t have to invite them either. We’ll eat out there tonight, when Momma gets home—we’ll make sandwiches.”

“Sandwiches aren’t a cookout,” Sammy had said.

Dicey had lowered her voice and said, all confidentially and teasingly, like she was talking to Maybeth and Maybeth alone: “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We can cook Sammy.”

Maybeth giggled. She loved it whenever Dicey was silly, and it didn’t happen much anymore—it felt like a little bit of silliness went out of Dicey every day.

“Nooo,” Sammy said, giggling too.

“We’ll roast him. We’ll turn him on a spit. We’ll have Sammy Tillerman barbecue with cookies and corn on the cob, and we won’t invite any of those kids from your class. I bet—I bet it was an awful party anyway. I bet nobody there was even nice.”

But it was Jessie Oliver, and Jessie _was_ nice. Jessie hadn’t laughed when the teacher had called on Maybeth to read out loud and Maybeth had stayed quiet, her face burning. She’d given Maybeth her cupcake at lunch once, when Maybeth had only had half a sandwich. She’d let Maybeth have a turn with her paddle ball toy, and she’d even counted the number of bounces Maybeth had gotten with it, cheering her on.

She was nice. They just weren't friends, even though Maybeth would have liked it if they had been.

Maybeth didn’t mean to cry and make Dicey sad and angry about all the things she couldn’t fix. She wanted to pretend better than that, so she tried to smile like it didn’t bother her.

Later she’d thought that maybe the Tillermans only had the kind of friends who would come and go, like Windy and Stu and Claire and Will—people who mattered but couldn’t keep you from being lonely.

But in Crisfield, everything changed. Some of it was luck, Maybeth thought, and some of it was being a Tillerman in a place where being a Tillerman didn’t mean anything to anybody or at least didn’t mean what it had meant back in Provincetown. (Didn’t mean Momma, and Maybeth didn’t like knowing that that helped. She would have rather had Momma, no matter what.) In Crisfield, their lives filled up. Maybe that was how you could tell you’d gotten home, if home was the place where your life was always supposed to be.

They all made friends there, but Maybeth made the first one.

“You have a beautiful voice,” Mr. Lingerle said to her. He was looking at her with a kind of fascinated curiosity, the way teachers usually looked at James. “Not just that—you have a good ear and good pitch, exceptionally good. Do you know what I mean? You can tell what the song wants.”

Maybeth did know what he meant, but she didn’t know what to say. “I love to sing.”

Somehow that was the right answer, because he smiled. Kids made fun of Mr. Lingerle because he was so fat, and the way they talked about him, it was like everything else about him vanished into fat, like there wasn’t anything else about him anyone might notice. But he had a nice, sweet smile.

“I love it too,” Mr. Lingerle said. “And I love to play. Do you play, Maybeth? Piano or anything else?”

She shook her head.

“Would you like to learn?”

It didn’t feel like the question she was so used to hearing from teachers: _Don’t you want to move up to the next grade, Maybeth? Don’t you want to stay with your friends?_ Mr. Lingerle was quietly excited—not just like he believed Maybeth could learn but like he really wanted to teach her, as if this was something they could do together and he was hoping she would say yes. It was an invitation, the first real one she’d ever gotten. Cousin Eunice’s friends had liked her and asked her places, but that was just because she was pretty, not because of something she really liked about herself.

“Yes,” Maybeth said. “Please.”

She liked how that made him smile all over again. It was when she started knowing that friendship could be even more than being kind. You could be excited about each other—she learned that from Mr. Lingerle. You could be excited together, too. Years later, she would call him sometimes, happiness bubbling up inside her, because something had happened and he was the first person she had thought of, the first person she wanted to tell just because she knew he’d understand.

**3**

Maybeth started home ec already knowing most of what Miss Eversleigh taught them, but she still liked the class. It was quiet, and she always knew what she was supposed to be doing and why she was supposed to be doing it; it came right after her algebra class, which always seemed to tie her head in helpless knots, and it was a balm to her to be able to go from that to Miss Eversleigh’s straight hems and beginner’s soufflés.

Soufflés were one of the new things about home ec, one of the things she hadn't already known, and she knew Gram would think they were so tricky and time-consuming that they were just plain silly. And Gram was probably right, but Maybeth’s heart still fluttered when she saw hers puff up in the oven.

Last period, a test had come back to her so marked up with red that it was like it had been dipped in paint. _(Review chapter three_ again, Miss Alston had written in the margin, not knowing that Maybeth had read it so many time she'd cried over it, her tearstains leaving little wrinkled spots on the pages.) But now she had a perfect soufflé.

“Maybeth, that’s wonderful,” Miss Eversleigh said. “Do you do much of the cooking at home?”

“Yes, but not soufflés.” She left out what Gram would have said about them. “I always used to help Gram with the cooking, and now I make a lot of our dinners.”

On an ordinary day, Miss Eversleigh would have already gone on to the next student, but soufflé day seemed to be trickier and more chaotic. Every other minute seemed to have a new oven timer going off, and the girl next to Maybeth was still frantically stirring her flour into her melted butter. If Miss Eversleigh moved on to her, there would be nothing for her to look at. She stayed with Maybeth instead, watching as Maybeth began to clean up her tiny kitchen workstation.

“You’re Dicey Tillerman’s sister, aren’t you?”

Maybeth nodded.

“You’re so different,” Miss Eversleigh murmured. "I wouldn't have believed it."

Maybeth wasn’t sure what to say. She could tell Miss Eversleigh that she and Sammy both looked like Momma, while Dicey and James looked like their father—but she didn’t know that she wanted to talk about all that would come with that. And if you looked at it another way, you could say that Dicey and Sammy were alike, and Maybeth was like Momma—but she didn’t like how that left James to either be alone or be like their grandfather, when he wasn’t going to be that way, not really. She finally just nodded again.

Miss Eversleigh studied her. She wasn’t silly, Maybeth knew. She looked like she could have been, but she wasn’t.

“Well,” she said at last, “it’s always good to see a student’s brothers and sisters. –Linda, let me help you with that.” She swept forward, leaving Maybeth to eat her soufflé at her now tidied-up station.

She wished she could have gone to help Linda too—Linda now had egg spattered all over her apron, and she looked quietly miserable—but with how small their kitchen stations were, she would have just been in the way. _Too many cooks_ , she thought; she had to suppress a little giggle.

She ate her soufflé slowly. They’d been able to make either cheese or chocolate, and Maybeth had made chocolate because its ingredients were more expensive and harder to get at home. The texture was perfect, pillowy and silky at the same time, and it was just slightly crackly on top, so that the feel of eating it changed as she went. It wasn’t until she was scraping her spoon against the bottom of the little cup that it sank in that she hadn’t thought about her algebra test this whole time.

She should remember that, when she had days that felt like they were too hard to keep going through.

She wanted to finish school, even if it meant taking—and sometimes failing—classes she couldn’t get herself to understand. Like she’d told Dicey, it was the way she wanted this part of her life to end: with a hard-won victory, not a defeat or retreat. Everything she was able to take in now was like a handful of seeds scattered in her mind. Someday, even if she didn’t know when, even the hard kernels of algebra might split open and flower into something beautiful. School was the best way to get the seeds she would never look for on her own, and she wanted her fair share of them.

But when what she wanted was neck-and-neck with how much she could take, she could come home and make soufflé, even if it was fluffy and fussy and everyone else thought it was silly.

Then she remembered Dicey coming home every day and going out to work on the boat, that whole first year after they'd come here. She'd spent every afternoon painstakingly sanding it down until the sides felt like glass. Maybe Dicey had been sanding away their long, hard summer, sanding her memories and worries until they were too smooth to cut.

Miss Eversleigh passed by again.

“Miss Eversleigh,” Maybeth said, catching her.

 _I’m more like Dicey than you think,_ she almost said. _And James is as stubborn as Sammy, as stubborn as Dicey.  
_

None of them really stood alone.

But it was enough for her to know that, wasn’t it? She didn’t have to go around telling people, especially when Miss Eversleigh wouldn't understand what she was trying to say.

“Yes?” Miss Eversleigh said.

“Do you have recipes for any more soufflés?” Maybeth said.

Miss Eversleigh smiled. “I do indeed. I’ll make copies of a few of them and bring them in for you.”

**4**

Mina played Paul Robeson for her. They all got used to Mina showing up at the house with a new record under her arm.

It never bothered Dicey that Mina came there for her but always spent some time with Maybeth first; Dicey would never have friends who didn’t like her family. Most of the time, she would stay while Mina played the records for Maybeth, her face sort of scrunched up in the way it tended to get when she was listening to something she wanted to hear all the way down to her bones. Dicey was always still when there was music on.

“You listen like somebody who can’t sing,” Mina said. “Like you have to drink it in and get it while the getting’s good.”

“I can’t sing,” Dicey said, unruffled. “Not well enough that I’d want to listen to me, anyway.”

Mina, on the other hand, listened like a dancer. She listened with her whole body, responding to the music with a tap of her foot, a flutter of her fingertips, an arch of her back. Her eyes were always sparkling. Louis had told Maybeth that Mina used to do ballet but that she didn’t always want to talk about it, so Maybeth had never asked her—but when she watched Mina listen to records, she could see how Mina must have danced. Maybeth wished she could have seen her. It must have been like watching the songs themselves moving around. Mina made everything visible—bold and deep and true.

“So that’s Robeson,” Mina said, sliding the record back into its sleeve. “ _Songs of Free Men_ , and if you liked it, I can bring some of his spirituals by next time.”

“I liked it a lot,” Maybeth said. “Especially ‘Joe Hill.’”

“He was real, good old Joe Hill. He was a musician himself—he wrote a lot of songs for the workers to sing, ones that let them sing out at the bosses who wouldn’t give them a break. When he died, he told everybody not to bother mourning him: just _organize_. Get back to working on making work fairer for everyone. No wonder Robeson liked him. He was always moving on to the next thing too. My momma has a biography of him—I’ll have to read it. I like knowing things about the people singing, don’t you?”

Maybeth nodded. She didn’t have to know, but it helped that feeling of conversation. It was like a light coming on and letting you see who you were talking to.

That was what dance was like too, she thought, at least the way Mina must have done it.

Maybeth didn’t know much about ballet, though. She didn’t know much about any kind of dance—Momma had play-danced with them sometimes, twirling them in circles, and at school they’d done square-dancing where the boys hadn’t wanted to touch the girls hands, and that was all. She knew what Louis had said, and she didn’t want to bring up something that would hurt Mina, but maybe it would be all right to ask. She’d only ask the once, and if Mina said no, Maybeth wouldn’t bother her about it again.

“Could you teach me to dance? Teach me about dancing?”

Mina looked at her for a second, almost startled, and then she laughed. “Sure, Maybeth. I’d like that. I don’t know every kind of dancing there is, but I know some, and if you don’t mind us looking like two fools, we can even figure out some more with some of those step-charts.” She hopped to her feet and mimed what she meant: one foot here, one foot there, turn.

“I don’t mind looking silly,” Maybeth said earnestly.

“Then silly it is.” Mina held out her hand and pulled Maybeth to her feet. “You’ll be good at it all, I bet. You feel the music.”

“Like you.”

“Yeah.” Mina grinned. “Like me.”

She liked her dancing lessons with Mina. She liked them in the same way she liked hearing Mina tell her about Paul Robeson’s life, about how and why and when he’d changed around some of the words in “Old Man River.”

Mina made Maybeth see her life like it was as deep as the bay, like she could pick any spot and plunge into it and keep reaching more. You could never get to the bottom of music, not if you really cared about it, just like you could never get to the bottom of people. You could never finish a garden, either. You’d never want to.

It was funny, because there was never any doubt that Mina was going to move away—she felt like she was made to wear a suit, and there weren’t many jobs in Crisfield where women did that—but even more than Gram, she was the one who showed Maybeth how she could be happy there all her life. Gram hadn’t always been happy before the children had come, after all, so it wasn't easy for her to explain how a person could love a life on her own. But Maybeth thought now that she could be happy there by herself, as long as she could look at the world like Mina. She could see how she just wanted to grow into everything she loved, just like a tree firmly rooted in its soil, spending her days thinking about Robeson and the glide and pliés and everything her love could lead her to.

**5**

Maybeth kept her piano in good condition. It was a mellow walnut, and when it was well-polished, it looked like sleek and chocolatey. It always reminded her of James’s Hansel and Gretel stories, where the witch’s house had been made of almond Hershey bars or shiny bricks of fudge.

It made sense that the piano would look good enough to eat. It was the other center of the house—if they were all under one roof, they would gather there or in the kitchen. Gram had teased her about being houseproud, but Maybeth tried to only be proud of what was really worth it. The piano was worth it.

Jeff helped her tune it every few months—he’d learned how, with his usual scrupulous attention to detail, and Dicey had taught him how to use all the tools until he moved with complete assurance. (Dicey had admitted to Maybeth once that she liked to watch him whenever he worked with his hands, and she’d blushed—no one else, Maybeth thought, could be as settled and as new to each other at the same time as Jeff and Dicey always seemed to be, even after all these years. James had known some kind of quote about it, something about washing clean laundry in public, which had tickled Sammy and Jeff both.) Tuning it was fun. There’d always be at least her and Jeff there for it, and often Dicey, and sometimes Sammy would come with baby Liza in tow, and they’d let her plonk the keys hard with her chubby little hands when they needed to see if a note would hold loud and true at the same time.

“Teach me,” Liza started begging, once she was old enough to understand that Maybeth gave lessons.

She was still too little for Maybeth to take her as a student, but she happily let Liza sit on her lap and swat at the keys or put her hands on Maybeth’s as Maybeth slowly picked her way through “Chopsticks” for her.

Her real students were older, and Maybeth liked them all. There was fourth-grader Jenny May Iles, who got in as many playground fights as Sammy ever had and sometimes showed up with a defiantly bloody nose. There was sixth-grader Paul, Louis Smiths’s son, who played so electrically that Maybeth always expected applause to spontaneously rush in when he finished. Paul was going to study piano in college, or so he’d already solemnly vowed to her. She had all four of the Barnett children, all of them as roly-poly and enthusiastic as puppies. Dorothy Lipinski was in her sixties, and Maybeth taught her piano and voice both. Dorothy reminded Maybeth of Gram. She liked to say that she was bad, just awful, and it was a shame to start learning so late, but she was so bad she couldn’t have started earlier—she would have died of embarrassment, being this bad when she was younger. She had to get old enough to not mind making a fool out of herself.

“You’re not making a fool out of yourself,” Maybeth always promised her. “You’re getting better all the time.”

“Well, you don’t charge enough that I’m paying you to be sweet,” Dorothy would say, “so I suppose you must mean that at least a little.”

Her piano and voice students didn’t bring in nearly as much money as the hens, who were such good layers that three grocery stores around Crisfield bought directly from Maybeth. They brought in a little more than her herb garden, especially after the powdery mildew had gotten her basil last year.

She wasn't anything like rich, but even with just the egg money, she probably wouldn't have had to worry much—but no matter how much money she had, she would still have taught piano and voice. There was such a joy—this was one of the things she’d called Isaac Lingerle just to say—to leading someone like that, to following along with them as they got better and better.

And she would always remember the day Jenny May arrived for her lesson—only one pigtail unraveled, and no blood or bruises, so Maybeth could breathe easily—and ate her way through a plate of brownies before she sat down at the piano. She’d been losing interest for a while, Maybeth thought, and she might not keep coming to lessons for very long if her parents realized how little and how listlessly she’d been practicing. Jenny May didn’t want to quit, Maybeth knew. She liked coming to Maybeth’s farm every Wednesday—maybe she could help out a little with the chickens instead, or Maybeth could teach her to garden. She was like Sammy—it had always been a mistake to ask her to sit so still. But for now, Maybeth was still passing on what music she could.

“This was one of my momma’s favorites,” she said. She found the sheet music for “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and set it on the stand. “If you can play it, I’ll sing.”

“You sing better than I play,” Jenny May said.

Maybeth laughed. “I’ve been singing a lot longer than you’ve been playing.”

This would be a good last song with Jenny May—if you ever had a last song with anyone. If Jenny May kept coming to the farm, if they simply found a new reason for her to be there once a week, then they were bound to sing together, at least.

But it was still a good last lesson. _How can there be a cherry which has no stone?_ the song asked. _How can there be a story which has no end?_

_A cherry when it’s blooming—it has no stone._

_The story that I love you—it has no end._

Maybeth used to think it was a sad song, because Momma had always sung it sad. She didn’t think so anymore. When she sang it now, sometimes she sang it for Momma—there’s a way out of this, she sang across the distance: sometimes there’s a way to have a baby with no crying. It was a song for Momma, but it was for everyone else, too, because they all had to live in the song’s riddle. They all had to wonder how you could give someone you loved a life without all the hard and dark and bitter things, and they all had to answer it as best they could.

Jenny May played it all the way through three times, and by the third time, she was singing along with Maybeth. She sounded young and clear and sure.

“I like this one,” she said.

“So do I,” Maybeth said.


End file.
